Calamity - Newspaper Office - Finished...for now

I have finished off the Newspaper Office for the time being. There is some additional weathering I want to do but I won't do that until its on its base and I'm working on the board. I want everything to blend together on the board so final weathering and some details will wait till then. Its definitely part of the project that I want to get to this year. I need to revisit my little working model of Calamity (which I have managed to misplace) and play with the arrangement a bit more as well as add in some elevations. I want Calamity itself to be on a slope which will require some additional foundation work on all the buildings.

Lessons Learned!
This is the first building I have built entirely from styrene plastic (well outside of an actual kit). Everything else I have scratchbuilt has been from combinations of materials; wood, cardboard, matt board and styrene.
The construction itself was pretty straight forward so most of my lessons revolved around painting it.

1) Measure twice, cut once (classic rule). The only mistake I really made along this line was on the roof and not making it overhang the eaves enough. I was able to work in another course of shingles that hide the edge, but it could have been avoided by simply double checking before I cut the plastic.

2) Think everything through before you start. I made some notes on construction before I started but I left some things kind of hanging and those came back to haunt me a bit. Most of this revolved around the addition. I initially planned to assemble the walls with the long walls overlapping the shorter walls. Somehow I managed to reverse that when I actually assembled the building resulting in the floor not being the right dimensions and I had to re-cut it so it wasn't as wide and a little longer.

3) Weathering undercoat. Since the styrene is so smooth even with primer, my liquitex inks even with a bit of paint had a hard time taking hold. Next time I will lightly sand both sides of the styrene to add a bit of tooth to the plastic for the paint.

4) Peeling paint 1. While the peeling paint effect worked quite well in some places, notably the lighter colored trim, it was almost invisible on the red siding. Pay attention to your colors so you can maximize the effect. Also, because of the lack of tooth on the plastic, in many spots when I peeled paint I went right down to the plastic. Next time I will do the undercoat and then give it a coat of dullcoat before applying the chipping fluid.

5) Peeling paint 2. I used my tried and true rubber cement, which did not work well on this model. Next time I'll either use hairspray (applied by brush) or the chipping fluids I have from AK Interactive.

6) Paint everything inside first! I know this in the back of my head and then ignored it in the excitement of the build. Its easier to paint everything inside when it is laying flat on the table rather then when its completely assembled. While I did remember this for the inside, I discovered that when I wanted to change the color I couldn't really get a brush in where I needed it after I had assembled the walls. Also the doors and windows would have been much easier to weather and paint if they weren't glued in place. I guess these are lessons re-learned.

7) Paint splatter! I don't know why I didn't think about it but I should have taped over all the window openings when I was painting the building. I had paint splatter all over the inside of the building, mostly on the light textured wallpaper. I was able to match the paint and cover most of it and it doesn't look to bad. This especially true if you are going to be using and airbrush to apply the exterior paint which is what I usually do (also apply exterior paint before putting the windows and doors in).

8) Remember to remove paint from the places where things need to be glued together. I actually remember this but its a good thing to point out when working with styrene. I prefer to use Plastruct Plastic Weld (the good toxic stuff) which can really attack paint, so think ahead a bit.

In the end I'm pretty happy with the building. While it may not be the true "Hero" building that I had in mind it looks good and reminded me of what I needed to do when working on one of these. Right now I'm looking at doing three more buildings; a corner saloon/hotel, the railroad station and the bakery (I only refer to this as a bakery because the original building is currently a bakery and prior posts refer to it that way). I may do a couple of others, but these take a lot of time so I still intend to use my MDF laser cut buildings to fill in the rest (and the bulk) of Calamity

On to the pictures!

The Newspaper Office with a brand new citizen out front. The red is a little dull in this shot.

This is much closer to what the red looks like in the "flesh"

A close up of the peeling paint affect. The darker wood is the original weathered undercoat, the lighter wood is done with a brush to give a little contrast and to cover up the plastic that was exposed when I "peeled" it.

And yes, I didn't paint the back of the false front, that is deliberate.

The emergency exit, or perhaps a good spot for an ambush.

The interior, I like the color variation in the floor. I have no idea of I'll be able to pull that off again. Remember to paint with the grain and pull your brush all the way across in one stroke.

The addition. Its not really that bright, its small so its really reflecting the light from the lamps.

The roofs

A foot print shot

Calamity - Newspaper Office - A few coats of paint

I was able to get some work done on the Newspaper office. I'm not terribly sure I'm happy with it and I think the red is to dark to really let my paint peeling technique really pay off.

I started with a new undercoat. This is the first coat of paint I put on and its suppose to represent weathered wood. I like the color that I arrived and I think I can modify it a bit to get some variations without to much trouble. The issue I had is that the Liquitex ink really has a hard time adhering sometimes, even when combining it with a bit of paint over a primed surface. In this case I had primed all the exterior walls in white and I was still getting some beading up of the mix, which required almost scrubbing it on to the walls. So perhaps more effort than its worth, but I think I will continue to experiment with it a bit. I used 1 part Liquitex White, 1 part Liquitex Carbon Black and 1 part Liquitex Raw Umber along with some matt medium to act as a bit of a binder.

After that had dried I applied rubber cement in random patches on all the exterior walls but mostly towards the bottom edges of the walls. I painted the main wall color over this. This was 4 "drops" of Vallejo Shadows Flesh from their Panzer Aces line along with 2 drops of Liquitex Naphthol Crimson and thinned it down a bit more with water. I like the color, kind of like a box car red (of which there are many variations).

The last step tonight (well after I painted a little bit of the trim) was to fade it. I used very thinned down Liquitex white and applied it in strokes following the "grain" of the wood. I over did this in more than a couple of spots and on the front, I actually managed to expose white primer on the edges of the clapboard siding. I'm not sure if I'm going to go in and fix that or not. I'm also undecided if I liked what I did. Where it was really over down I went back in and made a lighter version of the base color and went back over it (and pretty much the whole building). The lighter version was 4 drops of Vallejo Red Leather, 2 drops of Vallejo Shadows Flesh and 2 drops of Liquitex Napthol Crismson.

The trim all needs one more layer of paint and needs to be neatened up on the doors in particular. I saved all actual wood trim for later.

I think I need to sleep on it at this point and I'll decide whether I like it or not after I have stepped away for a bit.

Calamity - Newspaper Office - Final Assembly

I'm just about done with the Newspaper Office for Calamity. I glued all the walls together, added some interior and exterior trim, finished the false front (almost) and built the roofs. Time flies when you are having fun and last night was about 4 hours worth of work. Everything just seems to take up more time than I think it should. But, the building is finally coming together all that is left to do at this point is finish off some things I missed, touch up the interior paint and paint the exterior.

Here are the pictures from last night, along with a little commentary:

First walls up on the main building, using the new magnetic clamps

Adding the first side wall to the main building

And the magnetic clamps aren't working as well as I hoped they would. Had to resort to my brute force steel blocks

Roof support added to the false front

Time to build a roof

Roof supports and some extra plastic sheet for strength

Tar paper added and first strip of shingles on

Finished the shingles on one side, moving over to the other

Shingles are done, just need the ridge line pieces.You can see them in a little pile just above the roof.

And the ridge is finished. These are the O scale Shake Shingles from Wild West Model Builders.

The front, just needs some trim and the ornamental supports for the top. Couldn't find my package of supports last night, I'm sure I put them in a "safe" place.

And with the roof off, shows off a bit of the interior. I'm seriously considering lighting at this point but I can't find a source of Hurricane style lamps. Probably overkill anyway.

The first wall and floor for the addition. See how the board and batten style siding will still be seen where the original exterior wall and rear door are incorporated into the addition.

And the addition is basically finished

Overall look at the building from the single window side. The blocked alley will likely come as a surprise to some poor unsuspecting outlaw, the locals will know all about it though.

And a view from the other side. The paint work on the exterior of the rear wall is an experiment using Liquitex inks for the weathered undercoat of the building. In this case, a drop of white, a drop of black and a drop of raw umber. I like the look but the ink is hard to apply straight up. I'll have to add some acrylic medium to it.

Test fitting the roof. Sigh, failed on the measure twice cut once. Its not quite covering the sides of the building. I'll have to figure out a way to fix this.

The building with trim added. Hard to see here since all the plastic is white.

Rats! I forgot the baseboard trim in the main building.

Trim is finished, roofs are finished and in place. Looks a little hodgepodge at the moment with all the different materials being used. Painting will bring it all together.

And from the other side. The little nook here in the back should be a good ambush spot.

Well, I'm not quite as finished as I thought I was after I looked at the pictures. Need to fix a few things and then I can get some paint on this one.

Calamity - Newspaper Office - Interior work

A bit more progress on Calamity's next building. I made a run to one of the craft stores and picked out some paper from the scrapbooking section that had some texture on it. The texture is probably a bit out of scale but its useful for this. I'm using this for wallpaper. I went to work and painted the wood first, which allowed me to be a little messy and then applied the wallpaper in strips. Now a real wall hanger wouldn't leave the seams that I did, that was deliberate on my part. I wanted more texture to draw the eye into the building. At this point I'm about ready to assemble the whole thing but that will have to wait till I can get back to my regular workbench and my clamps. There are still exterior details to finish off, like the top front and the backside of the false front plus I haven't cut out the roof pieces yet either. They shouldn't require much work since I'm just going to apply shingles directly to the plastic. I might add another interior wall to this one, I haven't quite decided yet. I need to decide before I assemble the building as I'll  have to make some adjustments on the interior side of the long walls. We will see. I have also toyed with lighting the interior, but I haven't found anything that I can really make into a light easily, plus I would have to figure out how to wire it. I can save that for another day.

Here are a few pictures of the progress so far:

Some dark wood color applied to anything that resembles wood on the inside. Since the top will be covered with wallpaper I can be messy here,

I decided to start applying the wallpaper to the walls of the addition first. Here is the first strip glued in place, I used Scotch Quick-Dry Adhesive for this.

Three strips applied and trimmed up.

Finished with the wallpaper in the addition

Finished with the wallpaper in the main room

The other side of the rear wall finished up.

Dry fitting the parts together to see how they look. Pretty pleased at this point. Didn't have any painted citizens with so this one had to do.